Mapping entities to ASPNETDB.MDF MVC3 - database

Question

In order to avoid having two databases, I have mapped my entities to ASPNETDB.MDF, which is made automatically for membership. I was following this article in order to map my entities to existing database: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/08/03/using-ef-code-first-with-an-existing-database.aspx
From what I understand all I need to do change is the name of the databse for the context class like this:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Data.Entity;
using UniversityApp.Models;
using System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.Conventions;
namespace UniversityApp.DAL
{
public class ASPNETDB : DbContext
{
public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }
public DbSet<Review> Reviews { get; set; }
public DbSet<Movie> Movies { get; set; }
protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
modelBuilder.Conventions.Remove<PluralizingTableNameConvention>();
}
}
}
Also I have changed the connection string like this:
<connectionStrings>
<add name="ApplicationServices" connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf;User Instance=true" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
<add name="MovieContext" connectionString="Data Source=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf" providerName="System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0"/>
</connectionStrings>
Everything seems to work fine (methods to the old database, reading and writing to the databse, even the initialization data). But still when I open the connection to ASPNETDB.mdf I don't see my tables there. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I think you're going to run into more issues here such that in general this may not be the best approach right now. That being said, to answer your actual question, DbContext is looking for a connection string with the same name as your context. That is, it's looking for a connection string named "ASPNETDB". Since your connection strings are named "ApplicationServices" and "MovieContext" DbContext is not finding either of these.
To make DbContext use a specific connection string just pass that connection string to the DbContext constructor. For example:
public class ASPNETDB : DbContext
{
public ASPNETDB()
: base("name=ApplicationServices")
{
}
...
}
Once you get this working you'll probably want to look into using Migrations to create tables in a database that already exists.